Book Review: Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

I picked up this tattered paperback (libraries really shouldn't invest in paperbacks, in my opinion) because the title caught my attention. The cover itself is understated, a black and white photo of Mayan ruins, the stepped pyramids with which we are all familiar. But the idea of a collapsing society had me intrigued.

Jared Diamond is easy to read, and he is knowledgeable in his subject matter. He won a Pultizer Prize for his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, and that is on my reading list next. He is a scientist and professor working out of LA who spends a few weeks a year in Montana. Again, I am intrigued, because I have always wanted to visit or live in Montana. Montana: where the sky is as big as your dreams! (I made that up, but I'll sell it to the Montana Visitors Bureau, if they're interested.)

I appreciate Diamond's attitude. Although he is writing a book that looks at how human society's have collapsed over the centuries, and several of the reasons he leans on are environmental and therefore this book could easily devolve into an environmentalist's rallying cry, because of his time in Montana, he understands the other side, too. He understands the hardships facing small farmers. He understands loggers and miners. He understands the benefits and drawbacks facing a community of poor residents who have an influx of wealthy neighbors only part of the year.

Those wealthy neighbors buy property that used to be farmland. No one has farmed it for years, and no one will. You can argue for farmland preservation (and this is for my Lehigh Valley readers) but if the little guy can't make a living and his children aren't interested, what's a farmer to do? As Diamond puts it, the land is his only retirement income; he has to sell. And who's buying? The wealthy businessmen and Hollywood types. Or, in the Lehigh Valley, businesses who build ugly concrete warehouses. But buying the land makes the value of the rest of the area rise, making it difficult for families to afford housing. So the response is mixed.

After going into detail about the state of Montana, using it as a microcosm, Diamond moves on to other societies, like Easter Island, land of the tall stone statues; the Pitcairn islands of the South Pacific; and the difference between the Inuit and Norsemen of Greenland, one group who thrived and the other which did not.

This is where the text bogs down. While I find detail interesting and the readability itself is easy to follow, Diamond gives more detail than I find necessary. Instead of simply telling me the only way the people of Henderson survived was through trade with Pitcairn and Mangareva, he describes how scientists study basalt and midden heaps. But he is a scientist, after all, so he finds all of that interesting.

The book is worth the read. If nothing else, it will spark a discussion of the good, the bad, and the environmentally ugly.